As communication networks continue to grow at a rapid pace and continue to add more services, increased bandwidth usage is being seen. Data switches have limited bandwidth capacity and unchecked bandwidth usage can rapidly exhaust the capacity of the data switch. Counters are used on data switches to monitor bandwidth usage. However, these counters have a maximum counting limit before they rollover. A rollover of a counter occurring in the interval between collections of counting data can cause erroneous calculations of bandwidth usage for the data switch.
A need therefore arises for a system and method for managing network traffic.